Brought me into her home.

She’s the one who introduced me to Chris.

But when pressure came from her superiors, she didn’t protect me.

She let me go, and made sure it was on my record.

It wasn’t just disappointing. It was calculated.

And in the wreckage of all that loss, he showed up.

I never meant to choose him.

He pursued me relentlessly in the shadow of my grief, 

after death had stolen my footing and I didn’t have the strength to fight being wanted.

Not then.

Not when my world was already unraveling.

He wore me down with promises, persistence, and timing.

And before I could fully catch my breath, I became his person.

But in truth, I was never just his.

I was only nineteen.

We never really dated. not in the traditional sense.

Instead, we did everything with his mother.

From workouts to dinners to weekends away, she was always there.

Between the ages of 19 and 24, before we were ever married, it wasn’t just a relationship with him, it was a fusion. 

Me, him, and his mom.

And over time, that triangle became my normal daily life.

His needs. Her needs. Their chaos.

I became her emotional caretaker before I even realized what was happening.

And when we finally married at 24, I didn’t just become a wife.

I became the full-time manager of a life I never actually chose.

Then the default parent to our children.

Then the emotional backbone of a world built around everyone else’s needs but mine.

I didn’t just become a wife.

I became everything for everyone, while slowly becoming nothing to myself.

I managed the household and all the businesses.

Built systems from scratch, automated what others couldn’t see.

I created structure out of chaos, scaled companies on fumes,

and turned broken pieces into moving machines, all while homeschooling with no one to lean on for support.

I built an empire in the dark.

With babies on my hip and exhaustion in my bones, I learned how to delegate, automate, and negotiate.

I outworked men twice my age and outsmarted problems people said couldn’t be solved.

But somewhere along the way, I became a machine too.

And still. my children were never the darkness.

They were the only thing that made me glow at all.

But even the brightest love can’t keep a woman from going numb when she’s lost herself.

The darkness was slow, seductive, and suffocating, 

until one day, someone unexpected walked into my life.

Not a friend. Not a therapist.

An employee.

An assistant.

She showed up to help me manage the chaos.

Emails. Schedules. Loose ends.

But what she gave me, without knowing it, was something far more sacred.

A mirror.

She was younger.

Bright-eyed. Brave.

And without knowing it, she mirrored the girl I used to be.

The one I thought I’d lost.

Her curiosity, her fire, her laughter, it brought back memories I hadn’t touched in years.

She reminded me of mud-wrestling at midnight. Of stolen board shorts and stormy hikes.

Of mischief, movement, and the wild joy of living unfiltered.

It was a sisterly bond once forgotten.

It was remembrance.

But it didn’t fully break me open while she was here.

I fought it, holding on to years of suppressed trauma, stuffing it down like I always had.

It was her leaving that caused the floodgates.

Her absence cracked something in me I didn’t even know was bracing for impact.

And in the silence she left behind, the dam burst.

The awakening wasn’t sudden.

It was a slow collapse, 

a nervous system unraveling after years of holding too much.

It started with fatigue. Then anxiety. Then full-body grief.

I couldn’t outrun it anymore.

My mind began to process what my body had been carrying in silence:

The decades of suppression.

The weight of roles I never chose.

The grief of a girl who never got to grow wild.

And when I finally fell apart, it was holy.

Because it wasn’t a breakdown, it was a breakthrough.

Not chaos.

Clarity.

And today, standing barefoot in the kitchen with music in the air and sauce on the stove,

I felt her again.

The girl who once lit up entire rooms and pulled others into her spark.

She was the one who rallied her friends to go out when everyone else wanted to stay in.

The one who pulled the fire alarm not once, but multiple times freshman year, just to get the dorm outside for a spontaneous midnight mud-wrestling match.

She was mischievous. Unapologetically alive.

The kind of person who convinced her new college dorm mate to climb into one leg of a stolen pair of board shorts so they could walk the halls introducing themselves, doubled over in laughter.

She hiked in storms. Went bouldering with the guys. Camped on the side of a mountain in the pouring rain with 15 friends and didn’t flinch.

She once snuck into a guy friend’s house, with help from his sister, just to toilet paper his room in pink.

She was bold, playful, unforgettable.

She took her little sister and best friend everywhere once she got her license, windows down, music loud, always up to something, always laughing too hard.

She was freedom personified.

And I miss her.

I miss those friendships forged in mud and midnight.

I miss the way life used to spark.

I miss the version of me that didn’t need to be perfect to be good.

The one who didn’t measure her worth by how dependable she was, how selfless, how married.

Some part of me still fears her.

Fears that if I unleash her now, she’ll blow up the life I’ve so carefully built.

But another part, the deeper, wiser one, knows that’s not true.

She doesn’t want to burn everything down.

She wants to bring me back to life.

And this time, I’m not building from pressure or pain.

I’m building from clarity.

And that changes everything.